


'a whimsical bride'

by Lilliburlero



Series: God send euery gentleman [2]
Category: Marlows - Antonia Forest
Genre: F/M, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Minor Character Death, Original Character(s), Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-24
Updated: 2013-04-24
Packaged: 2017-12-09 09:25:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/772613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A study in the profound emotional obtuseness of the English upper-middle-class/squirearchy, or what Giles Marlow thinks is the right thing to do may sometimes turn out to be the wrong thing to do.</p><p>As a post-canon story, this contains a smattering of spoilers, most notably for <i>The Thuggery Affair</i> and <i>Run Away Home</i>.</p><p>Content advisory: inexplicit reference to sex between a character aged 17 and one aged 6 or so years older; minor character death, as the delayed result of a canonical suicide attempt.</p>
            </blockquote>





	'a whimsical bride'

**Author's Note:**

> Deeply indebted to [Ankaret](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Ankaret/pseuds/Ankaret/works?fandom_id=116635)'s Marlow fic, especially ["Term of Duty"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/28545/chapters/37863) and ["Giles Marlow's One and Only"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/28574/chapters/37919), from which I take details I've come to regard as canon. 
> 
> *
> 
> The story title is taken from Louis MacNeice's version of "The Streets of Laredo".

It was their last time. Giles, now knowing a John Dory from a killer whale at 200 paces, was leaving _this pleb dump_ for Trennels tomorrow, his ship on Monday. A pigskin case, not new but clearly first-hand in a way that to Patrick seemed most unMarlovian, was propped open in a corner or the room, revealing serried cable-knit jumpers and twill slacks (did Giles _have_ to dress quite so much like a knitting pattern’s idea of an off-duty naval lieutenant? It would be embarrassing even if one were not.) Packing was an activity that Patrick could only accomplish with furious, inelegant speed, rather like—suddenly uncomfortably reminded of _The World, The Solar System, The Universe_ in painstaking best cursive on Nicola’s battered relic, he gazed intently at the appalling wipe-clean wallpaper, busy with unsettlingly realistic sparrows and pink dog-roses on a green trellis. He wondered if the landlady had hung it. The hideous pattern was matched with care and some skill. The woman Patrick saw from across the street these Wednesday mornings, getting into her car while he loitered, waiting for her to be gone, didn’t match the word _landlady_ : she was probably only a year or two older than Giles, small and dark-haired, not exactly pretty, but stylish in a sort of high-street chain-store way. She looked a bit like Claudie. She must have a husband, there was a child—Patrick grinned at himself. She was probably pretty taken with her good-looking, dashing lodger, anyway, at which thought he bumped up against the recollection of some of Giles’s more scabrous misogyny. Funny at the time, it now made him wince. He made to sit up and was flattened with thrilling speed and force.

‘Where the fucking hell do you think you’re going?’

Not long ago—about five minutes ago, in fact—he would have thought that what Giles did then was pretty much the most glorious thing in the world, the solar system, the universe—it was the staple of his night thoughts, his daydreams and anything there was room for in between and it hadn’t happened anything like often enough. Now, he almost felt the impulse to push him away. He didn’t, though—he didn’t know when, if ever, he’d get another chance like this.

When Patrick got up again, conscious he would have to cycle like a Tour de France pacesetter pursued by furies to make it back for double German, Giles was already exuding that vast, _noli me tangere_ self-satisfaction that meant it was all over for today, but today _today_ meant _for good_. Patrick grabbed his shirt and shrugged it on, then scrabbled for underpants.

Giles, naked and sprawling, thumb and forefinger working lazily at the base of his cock as he cupped his balls in the rest of his right hand, said, ‘Judith Oeschli died, did you know that? Liver failure got her in the end.’ 

Patrick had once read a short story in which the narrator claimed that the naked have a social advantage over the clothed, which he was at a loss to understand until that moment, or at least, he had never felt trouserlessness quite so acutely, and there had been a good few times at prep school.

The moment for even the most anodyne of responses—how much plain human decency would it have taken to muster _How foul for poor Edward_? was a question that came to Patrick in the gibbering, sheet-kicking small hours for some time afterwards—passed, definitively passed. So, excepting ‘Cheerio’, Giles’s inscrutable utterance stood as their parting word for thirty-one months. Whereupon he materialised at Trennels with the ineffable nimbus of _active service_ and a vivacious Gibraltarian fiancée whom Patrick loathed on sight, but hoped nonetheless was not over-virtuous and knew what the score was. (As it transpired, she indeed wasn’t, but also didn’t.) 

That year was Patrick’s _annus horribilis_. He had atoned for failing Oxford entrance by flinging himself into the breach left by Rowan Marlow’s decision to pursue the part-time Tech. course that she proposed to her parents she must enroll in now or forever clamp her mangels. Geoff and Pam had agreed with all the haste of guilt, realising that Ann, now at most a biannual visitor to Trennels despite residence in London, was not after all the daughter with a dangerous aptitude for self-immolation. Patrick’s father spent his visits to the country canvassing, or whatever it was when you knew an General Election was on the way but it hadn’t been called yet; then it was called and won but Anthony still had much business in town. His mother, with an infant daughter in tow, liked to be near what she called civilisation, meaning plays by Peter Shaffer, lunches with Jane Harman and cafés serving more than one kind of coffee. Patrick was surprised to find he missed little Thomasine. He liked being able to dodge parties he hadn’t wanted to attend in the first place with the madly unlikely excuse of babysitting, he enjoyed bathtime with toy ships and plastic ducks and rather especially, telling bedtime stories in his mews voice, the effect of which on a tantrum even his mother owned was nothing short of remarkable. He didn’t miss Helena, or expect to. 

So, with Mariot Chase all in dust-sheets, Sellars and Nellie having retired, Patrick lodged at Trennels, miserably aware he was no-one’s idea of a farm manager, even a trainee one. He was reduced to the speechless timidity of his early adolescence by (in roughly ascending order) receiving telephone calls, agricultural machinery, Min. of Ag. paperwork., Min. of Ag. officials, marts, sales reps, making telephone calls, Rotary Club dinners, Conservative Club dinner-dances, EEC paperwork, management of permanent employees, engagement of temporary hired hands, and any given column of figures. 

The Marlows paid him a minute salary which he was nonetheless at a loss to spend, having no rent and taking his meals with the family. The estate car was mostly his to drive on errands; so he rarely had a bus or train fare to think of. His only expenses were 10 cigarettes a day and the odd round down the pub. He protested; Mrs Marlow said he couldn’t well work just for his keep, that was slavery. Save the money against some exigency, she said; he saved for a mighty blowout at some time unforeseeable (London, bookshops, vodka martinis, the sort of bar where one might pick someone up) or in his gloomier moments, being sacked, or sacked-and-disowned. 

He probably didn’t do as badly as he thought. He worked hard, impelled by shame, and Rowan was still around a day and a half a week to pick up slack. He’d often found that things he found hard to learn would click into place at the point of despair; it was just rather unfortunate that his point of despair where learning how to run Trennels was concerned happened to coincide with not only Giles’s longest leave for ages, but the advent of Miss Marion Laredo, daughter of the late &c. &c., for a twenty-day stay.

It was to be a long engagement with a County wedding, all the trimmings, at the end of it. Marion, an only child before she was an orphan, had such a small family that it seemed only sensible to buck convention to the extent that they should eventually be married from Trennels, but everything else was to be by the book, Giles having taken extensive note of the huha surrounding his sister’s marriage, despite being around for none of it, and resolutely done otherwise. Despite seeming all so madly unpromising, Kay’s domestic arrangements had worked out rather well. It was hard for Patrick, if no-one else, not to think that in that respect, too, Giles-and-Marion was going to turn out the reverse of Karen-and-Edwin. But what did he know? Those meetings in Cranden had been driven by a consuming affectlessness; he had no idea what Giles _being with someone_ might look like. Why assume that because the furtive bit of himself was the realer bit, the same was also true for Giles? Maybe that rather posed gentlemanliness—carrying things, walking on the outside, settling wraps on her shoulders, chiding her teasingly in a cracked bray which he supposed was what Giles had instead of a mews voice—was the genuine article. What he also didn’t know was why Giles, who could scarcely lack opportunities for casual and anonymous sex with men if that was what he wanted, it being practically in the job description, had taken the idiotic, nest-fouling risk of sex with _him_.

*

Nicola had been home since the end of her A-levels; not so Lawrie, who was rehearsing with the National Youth Theatre, playing a woman for the first time in her theatrical career. Ann, with whom she was staying, wrote resolutely uninformative missives on her behalf, so everyone cheerfully assumed Lawrie must be having a ball. (She was not, having found herself first of all not just not the best, but not even among the better in the cast; and then, pure talent having carried her about as far as it would, that acquiring technique was miserable hard slog.) The absence of her twin contributed to Nicola’s stubborn glumness, though it was not its chief cause. 

Patrick loathed himself for regretting Ginty, but Ginty would have been _masses_ easier, he didn’t like her nearly so much as Nick, she didn’t walk with her hands behind her back or set her jaw in that hardy way when she was thinking, or lope around in Giles’s cast-off windcheaters and cut-down trousers. Or not any more, anyway; he had a sudden, vivid memory of a time when she _had_ : flushed with the excitement of acquiring Catkin, making a superannuated No. 3 dress pullover look like something the Archangel Gabriel wouldn't be ashamed of. But there was no point in regret, however base. Ginty was in Co. Kildare shepherding tourists around the Irish National Stud. Whereas the former owner of half of Nick’s patched and tattered wardrobe was excruciatingly _here_. 

There was not even the consolation of conspiracy: Patrick found Nicola’s _nihil nisi bonum_ policy where Marion was concerned alarming; prolonged dissimulation gave her a stolid, Fob-ish demeanour. On the other hand, he recognised, intellectually if not quite emotionally, that to question Giles’s choice of bride was to question Giles, not something Nick was likely to countenance. Her friendship with unpromising and rebarbative Edwin had done something to set a precedent too, no doubt. Patrick was not quite sure how he’d have coped if she had been frankly jealous and hostile anyway; it was about as much as he could take as it was. He was aware he was being loathsome and baffling, going cold fish on her when she was all bruised and vulnerable. Not that he could ever manage much more than a pastiche of wholesome physical desire, or that Nick seemed, particularly, to want it. 

‘Oh, Catullus eighty- _five_ ’, he said, indulging aloud for once his sixth-formish equivalent of the Marlow naval _vade mecum_.

The estate room door, which had been slightly ajar, swung open. ‘Cuttlefish what? Has all that quadruple-entry welly-whanging sent you quite barmy?’

‘Hullo—? Peter? What are you doing here?’

‘I live here, pal. Ancestral manor, not for the inheriting of by Son Number Two, hence Son Number Two’s training in bleak Northern industrial city for remunerative profession, in no hope that remunerative profession will compensate in parental eyes for Son Number Two’s humiliating failure to maintain proud family tradition of service in the Service, but that remunerative profession will at least be remunerative, said training temporarily suspended by reason of summer vac., as of Wednesday, hence Son Number Two at your service.' 

‘How is UMIST, anyway?’ 

‘Grim. Ferrets, cloth caps, cold gravel fer tea, ee, you soft southrons donnot know yer born.’

Patrick laughed. ‘That’s Yorkshire, isn’t it? Or Monty Python?’ 

‘Haven’t a clue. All sounds the same to me. Actually, it’s pretty cheery, plenty of booze, not quite enough women, too much maths but thank God, no bells, no watches, no saluting the quarterdeck.’

‘Sounds all most unlike our own dear home life, if I may say so. Except for the maths.’ Patrick grimaced theatrically at a terrifying ledger propped open by the desk calculator, feeling he might have pushed it, but Peter grinned. 

‘Well, it's maths I don't have to do, which is the very _nicest_ sort. Is she gruesome, the unfortunate lass?’

‘No, very pretty, insofar as one is a judge of such things. Chatty, bubbly, jolly good sport. Everything you might expect—’

‘Wrapped up in white flannel, and cold as the clay?’

‘What? Oh, crikey. How hilarious. I’d never even thought of that.’

‘Really? It was the first thing that occurred to me when Mum wrote. Is Nick spitting tacks? I couldn’t really make _her_ letter out a bit.’

‘Do you know, I don’t really know either. She doesn’t seem to be, but there is a sort of—cloud—of minding terribly, if you see what I mean.’

‘God. My family. Oh, well, I suppose I better get a squinny at herself before Fob realises I’m home and claims me for nine weeks solid.’

Peter drove everyone bonkers, but Patrick at least was grateful of him. Some quality in the gamesomeness reminded him of that January night vigil—he had prayed for both brothers, of course, but it was not the thought of Giles in danger of his life that had impelled him back to the prie-dieu when he thought there was no prayer left in him, and nor would it be Giles if something ghastly like that were to happen again now. He loved Peter, he knew that with a warm, settled clarity, without any complication of desire. 

He wondered if Peter had prayed for him when he went on that crazy joyride—a thought which brought the painful _frisson_ that was Jukie. Jukie, who had killed someone with Patrick’s knife, someone for whom Patrick could not pray then, any more than he could now pray for Jukie, whom he abandoned to his do-it-yourself theology. Jukie, whose life he could have saved if he’d been a bit more stiff-necked and lawful, a bit more Ann-ish. Jukie, sitting on a milestone weeping for the boy he’d killed, wiping tears from his face with the back of his hand. The split second it would have taken to reach for his hand—and been beaten with a tyre iron and left for dead, Patrick told himself, knowing also he wouldn't have been. Patrick’s official line to himself was that Jukie had sealed his own fate when PC Catchpole jumped into the middle of the road. If Jukie had wanted to live he would have braked. But he didn’t, and he was fully prepared to take Patrick and Tom Catchpole with him—how could he regret not saving that sort of excuse for a life? But somehow, sensible as the official line was, it didn’t wash, especially not after dark.

*

‘So—whiskymacandahalfofmildpintofbitterandapintofHarp—you fearful pleb, Peter—and a white wine spritzer—I’m not sure Ma Studdart actually countenances the grape, Moll, would a G and T pass muster?’

‘Of course, darling.’ Marion rolled her eyes comically. ‘Civilisation tomorrow evening.’

Rowan noticed that Nicola’s sudden intent fascination with the fireside companion set was matched, if not exceeded, by Patrick’s with a foxed and faded reproduction of one of H. Alken’s Midnight Steeplechase engravings, but although she knew what the Nicola bit was about, she couldn’t fathom the Patrick bit, unless he was jealous of her being jealous of—which didn’t seem probable in one who, even as a skinny, feline little boy, had the precocious capacity to be amused by his own absurdities. And then she thought she recalled Mrs Merrick saying _civilisation_ when she meant _town_ , and content with that likely but erroneous conclusion and the drink that Giles had just set down in front of her, promptly forgot all about it.

The evening wore on merrily enough. Marion settled into her role as audience—attentive, appreciative, yet just a little sceptical. Patrick made a mental note to ask Nick whatever had happened to that Miranda West girl who visited a couple of Christmases ago, and then thought _better not_. Nick mustered an account of the festival where she’d dried up during a singing comp. and Lawrie had made a frantic bish out of a recitation. Peter told the for-company edit of the Thuggery affair, which only made Patrick think how many Marlow stories were subject to such censorship, or simply inexplicable. He would not care to make sense out of Gondal even for the most sympathetic auditor, nor that odd episode with Ginty and her school telephone which had done something at least to land him at Broomhill and—no, he wasn’t going to think of it.

Their little circle mutated. Ollie Reynolds (was he old enough to drink in a pub? Patrick supposed if Nick was—though wasn’t he younger?) sauntered over and treated Nicola to a detailed account of his various equestrian activities, to which Patrick could make only occasional interjection, feeling rather left out, horses having become to him so much more work than pleasure. Regina’s eventual demise had discouraged him from hawks for a while, and then there’d been the big row over the proposed ban two years back. The new RSPB warden was a distinctly unfriendly type, too, likely to make trouble. He thought of saying this, but Nick had firmly turned the conversation to her Sail Training Association stuff. On the other side of the unlit fireplace, Peter monopolised a tall, buxom, brown-haired girl who must be Oliver’s sister Wendy, much improved from the lumpen antagonist of Nick’s earlier anecdote. A classmate of Rowan’s from the Tech., who, judging from their mutually confidential manner, had dropped by something less than casually, drew her away from some farmerly-looking company which was going to be Patrick’s escape from showjumping and tall ships—he supposed he still should trot over and exchange a few words with Steve Penny and Brian Spender.

‘Are you all right?’ It was Marion, her unEnglish accent precluding that phrase’s usual implication of brisk buck-up or revolting pious concern. ‘I was trying to catch your eye—only to cadge a fag, at first, but then I got fascinated. You looked a bit like a miniature, you know, one of those melancholy Hilliards. And then, actually, I started to worry that you might have had a _petit mal_ seizure or something.’

‘My sincerest apologies, madam, for being the occasion of alarm.’ He performed a sitting-down sketch of hat-doff-and-bow, being an Elizabethan, and offered a cigarette. ‘Walter Raleigh, he was _such_ a stupid git, don’t you think?’

‘Curse him,’ she said. 

She waved away his light. ‘I rather can’t stand men lighting my cigs, not sure why. I think it’s just that Giles gets so perfectly tweedily miffed at it, it encourages me.’ 

She mimed Giles in perfect tweedy miff. Patrick started with surprised laughter; she was every bit as good a mimic as Lawrie, and she seemed a much sounder sort with it. 

‘Where is—?’

Marion nodded towards the bar. 

‘His round again? But I haven’t—and we should all be _much_ drunker.’

‘Mine, don’t worry. Giles thinks I don’t have the use of my limbs, or that women shouldn’t stand around at bars, or perhaps both. You can’t very well stand at a bar without legs.’

‘Sammy Barnes seems to be managing it,’ Patrick replied, realising that this meant a tedious walk back to Trennels, but glad to be able to deflect the conversation from Giles.

‘Gosh, he does, doesn’t he? Doesn’t he drive the local charabanc?’

‘We’re walking home, by the looks of it.’

Sammy Barnes started to sing ‘Ladies of Spain’; Mrs Studdart began the first manoeuvres in the long, familiar campaign of ejecting Sammy from her decent establishment; Steve and Brian, aware that they were about to be be pressed, emitted blimey-is-that-the-time noises. Ollie wrote something on a barmat and handed it to Nick and went over to rescue his sister from Peter’s puns, though she turned out to be enjoying them more than a protective brother might have expected, persuading him to stay for another. Giles disbursed a whiskey mac to Rowan, wedged the remaining three pints and two smaller glasses into a portable arrangement, easily side-stepped Fanny Studdart’s first sortie, Sammy’s evasive action, Steve and Brian’s uncoordinated jersey-grabbing, gents-visiting exits and made the table not a drop lost. 

Marion, who had half-anticipated her gin and tonic descending down Sammy’s collar as the prelude to a deliciously entertaining fiasco, said coolly, ‘Thanks. Nice waitering.’

‘Absolutely the only even-remotely-edifying thing you can learn how to do on a Friday night in Plymouth. And the first, if you want to live.’ Giles glanced at Peter, who now had Reynolds _frère_ thoroughly disarmed.

‘Oh, really,’ Patrick remarked, ‘I thought maybe their Lordships sent you on a course.’

Like many shy people, Patrick had a lugubriously intimate relationship with _l’espirit de l’escalier_ , but he hadn’t realised until that moment that its opposite could be far worse. Giles set his jaw and looked not-quite-at-and-over him as if he were Tessa, the family hound, about to engage in inopportune attention-seeking. Patrick later wondered what Marion saw at that chilling moment, what _Nicola_ saw—if anything, Giles a bit frazzled by the prospect of having to slough his home self for his Service self—or perhaps or more likely, Giles resolving to lay his brother out cold if he ever again whistled _That Goddamn Tune_ —the which Peter was doing as he marched funereally over to their corner, to the great amusement of the Reynolds siblings and Rowan’s half-embarrassed half-attention. 

Anyway, it was Nicola who said, with that mild way she had of being rather fierce, ‘Binks, belt the bloody hell up, would you?’ 

‘What?' he said, his innocence seeming quite genuine, which in fact it was.

‘You’ll get us flung out like Sammy. You know what Fanny S. thinks of folks singing in her decent establishment.’

‘I wasn’t—’ Peter caught Giles’s stony eye and gave up. ‘Anyway. Talking of—the Reynoldses want to know if we want a lift home—there’s only room for three really—maybe four at most—but I thought the gels could hop in and we three could slug it out for the roof-rack?’

‘Is he all right to drive?’ Giles asked.

‘It’s Wendy.’ Nicola put in helpfully. ‘Ollie hasn’t got his licence yet.’

‘And she’s the complete Temperance babe.’ Peter added. ‘Doesn’t like the taste.’

‘You’ve an early start, Patrick, why don’t you, and Binks and I’ll walk?’ 

Peter looked crestfallen, clearly having hoped to continue chatting up his fair pilot.

Patrick took a deep breath. ‘Yours is pretty early too, Giles—or I think maybe Peter should, since he did set it up.’ 

It wasn’t exactly an _eloquent_ look, Patrick thought, but it wasn’t one even a civilian would need the signal book for either. He felt a thoroughly perverse satisfaction, the more perverse for knowing that the satisfaction would drain away with the remains of his beer.

‘Oh—would you mind? Thanks awfully.’ Peter bounded back to Wendy and Oliver. 

Rowan, having said goodbye to her colleague (had any of the family noticed that kiss?—swift, but somehow rather more than social—Nick, maybe; she thought she didn’t mind Nick seeing, as it happened) returned to have the plan explained. 

‘Well, I could walk—I’ve no lectures till tomorrow afternoon.’

But of course neither Patrick nor Giles could hear of that.

Leaving the pub, Nicola took Patrick’s arm in a girlfriendly way which felt most odd to both of them; and approaching the Reynolds Volvo she shoved him firmly in the small of the back. ‘Get in,’ she hissed. ‘No protests. _Fait accompli._ ’

With, ‘All in? Cool, right-o—’, Wendy drove off.

‘I asked if I might,‘ Nicola explained, strolling back to Giles. ‘Chivalry unbesmirched. I wanted—you—to myself—just for a couple of hours. Because I haven’t had.’ She blushed.

Giles cuffed the back of her head. ‘You might have said before, idiot child.’

No, Nicola thought, she mightn’t. But that was by the by, and there was a lot of ship talk to get done in a six-mile walk.

*

‘You’ve been damned elusive,’ Nicola remarked a couple of days later, on finding Patrick in the scullery over a late supper. 

‘I’ve been silaging. It’s smellier, and I think less counter-Revolutionary.’

‘There any more tea in that pot?’

‘Yup, if you’ve brought your mouse to trot.’

‘Just how I like it.’

They sat in companionable silence for a bit in the dusky scullery. Patrick thought he really might as well risk it. 

‘Nick—why’d you walk home the other night? Not that I minded the lift, but I felt bit—’

‘—as if you’d fallen off a cliff, and everyone was being milk-not-tea?’ 

‘That and rather a churl.’

‘I thought I was being a bit too, but I couldn’t think you’d actually want to tramp for two hours with Giles for company, and I actually _did_. An awful lot, actually. I hardly said a word to him this leave. But if I’d said in the pub you couldn’t have accepted, so—why? Was there something else? Giles was in a bit of a huff with Binks, wasn’t he? For The Goddamn Tune. Dunno why, she doesn’t even seem to know it.’

‘No, no, I thought that was it. It was rather glamorous and Purdey; you should try it again sometime. I think she does, by the way.’

‘Who? Oh, the pudding-bowl haircut girl on the spy programme? She does what?’

‘No, Marion and the Tune. I think she’s rather good at not noticing when it doesn’t suit her. She’s a good actress. Like Lawrie—but—’

‘But what—?'

‘Well, self-contained, I think I mean—I like her.’

‘Oh, she's fine. Could be a deal worse, considering. Mmm. Look, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you about that evening.’

Oh, lor’, he thought, and after a couple of false starts it emerged that Ollie had asked her to this fundraiser hooli but not just that— _out properly_ , as well—and she wasn’t in the least sure about either a dinner-then-disco with a bunch of Pony Club volunteers or—but things hadn’t been going anywhere between them for ages now, and if _Ollie_ had noticed, because he really wasn’t the sort to wipe a bloke’s eye—

‘I—don’t really think—I don’t know. Maybe it hasn’t—I haven’t—maybe we _should_ cool it—I suppose it’s up to you.’

‘Oh. I see.’ She set her jaw and looked steadily over his right shoulder, suddenly and startlingly beyond comfort, and said very calmly, ‘Would you mind awfully leaving me alone—’

‘Nick—I—’ He reached across the table.

‘—Right away. _Please_.’

So he did, and not really knowing where to go, dithered hopelessly around the bottom of the stairs. He remembered Sprog flying up to the light-fitting yonks ago, bloody useless dead, dead, dead bird. A prickle of cold desolation spread from his scalp down his neck. With it came the mad, lucid insight that Giles—impossibly, Giles—had been seeking reassurance about the Oeschli business, that last Wednesday morning nearly three years ago—good Lord, no, _all along_ —from that first overmastering kiss—and Patrick’s failure to offer consolation had been as entirely crushing for Giles as Giles’s physical withdrawal had been for him. 

How very curious, the things that mattered to people.

**Author's Note:**

> This story grew alarmingly from a couple of paragraphs in an abandoned WIP, of which "Suddenly Acquainted" is also an offcut, and follows the same timeline. That means certain difficulties with regard to the Marlow brothers' careers as naval cadets: my fix has been to assume Giles entered Dartmouth from school, aged 18, and that Peter went to some sort of rather stiff-necked minor public school with compulsory OTC but has actually managed to duck the Service. I hope this will pass reasonable muster in the mild AU that is Since The War. 
> 
> Laredo is the maiden name of Molly (Marion) Bloom's mother. My Marion, I hope, shares with her namesake a certain disinclination to over-virtuousness, but no other comment on _Ulysses_ is intended.
> 
> Many online sources claim that "Ladies of Spain" and "The Streets of Laredo" share a tune. I beg to differ, but they are similar enough that Peter's whistling towards the end of this story is semi-plausibly an innocent earworm from Sammy's drunken roar.


End file.
